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The Foundry buys Mischief creator Made With Mischief

The Foundry has acquired Made With Michief, formerly known as 61 Solutions, creators of the cult pen-based sketching package Mischief.

Developed by former Disney Research consultant Sarah Frisken, and incorporating feedback from Disney artists, Mischief provides an intuitive drawing experience, described as being “almost like sketching on paper”.

The software enables users to work on an “infinite drawing canvas” with indefinite lateral scrolling and a zoom ratio of 50 trillion to one, producing near-infinitely scalable strokes.

The $25 tool is available for Windows and Mac OS X via the product website or the Mac App Store. Made by Mischief has also released Mischief-Free: a free trial edition with a limited set of brushes and colour palette.

The Foundry’s first step into the mass market?
As well as giving The Foundry access to some very cool new technology, Mischief is also its first truly mainstream art tool – a mass market that Adobe and Autodesk are increasingly targeting with their own apps.

However, it may not be its last. Made With Mischief itself will become a wholly owned subsidiary of The Foundry, but will remain a separate brand, focused on creating other digital art tools “for the creative masses”.

More details to come
The link below takes you to The Foundry’s official press release, which contains the essential information.

However, the company has just held a livestream discussing the acquisition which fleshed out some of the developer’s future plans for Mischief, so we’ll update with more details shortly.

Updated: fxguide has posted a great article on the acquisition, discussing Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields – the technology behind Mischief’s infinite canvas – and the implications it could have for The Foundry’s other tools, in particular Modo. It covers pretty much everything from the stream, and more, so check it out here.